On Hearing You Saw the Sunset

     "At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing, waiting,"
                                                  The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot

We see from time to time—alone—
Sights to enrich our everyday
Our experiences our existences
Filling us with awe and wonder
And wonderings if we share
Our memories with some other
Knowing we’ll soon forget
Tomorrow everything except
That once we saw the sun rise and set
On a busy, intent Metropolis
And waves crashed once on windy shores
And stars shot once across the sky
And so we live and so we die.

And I don’t believe that many of us today
Bent our necks upwards to see
Though with such a dearth of shady trees
We have a clear view through hazy skies
Above a gray and crumbling Babcock Street.
And I wonder if kids who live and die
Confined to the streets of Liberty City
Ever walk on paths not winding between buildings.
How many trees do they see in a day?
Do they even raise their burdened necks
To witness that the sun still rises and sets
On their own stone, gray tenements?

There should be some charity
One to which I would give
So kids who live without could see
Not museums, parks, or zoos,
But field trips to see the fables
A retiree’s yard in Coral Gables
With 100-year-old banyan trees.
Yes pack them into a ship
Of nervous, foreign tourists
And let them snorkel off the coral keys
Or see the half-naked sunbathers
The models, in-line skaters
Familiar bums against unfamiliar
Art deco, painted crumbling stucco
The grime and sublime of South Beach.

Yes, for kids who live without
To see and dare interrupt
A world so busy and intent
(Like theirs) on everyday existence
Yet so guardedly kept
Just beyond their own small world.
And that is, after all,
All that I can sympathize.
The Metrorail carried me over to safety.
Never have I ever had
To eke out my bare existence
Under Overton’s crumbling skies
To serve a hopeless sentence.

So, Stacey, the ordinary becomes extraordinary
But only if we dare
To hold our stares long enough to see
Where it is the ants carry our crumbs
Or where the sun goes when the day is done.
So by looking out your office window, now you know
How the sun rises and sets on Babcock Street
And on our lives bent and spent on industry
And you have helped me remember these things
Like how Melbourne first sounded to me when
Cars in driveways and I woke up together—then—
I could have sworn I saw buildings sway like trees¹
Bent perhaps to hear a distant ocean breeze.

¹The Church, “Hotel Womb”. “I say, why are those buildings swaying like trees?”

4/8/98